This weeks challenge is focused on your company culture. Company culture is one of the most important components of a successful, sustainable business yet often overlooked because it’s difficult to precisely measure. Yet a strong company culture is what holds an organization together and motivates people within to do the right thing rather than the easy thing.

Your challenge this week is to determine “Do you have a strong company culture?”

Answer the following questions and rate yourself on a scale of 1 – 5 (1 would be all no’s, 5’s would be confident yes’s):

Do you have remarkable employee satisfaction? Are your employees super productive? Do they focus on solutions not problems?

Is there open communication at your company? Do your employees feel empowered to speak up when they see an issue? Are they willing to suggest improvements to current processes and procedures?

Do prospective employees seek your company out because of the reputation you have in your industry and/or community? Do you find it easy to find and retain new employees?

Does your company get recognized by your industry and/or the media? Are you sought after for speaking engagements, participation in events and feedback on important industry or community issues?

How did you do? If you got a 5 for each area, congratulations, you’ve built a strong company culture with results to prove it. If you scored more 1’s and 2’s, it means you have some work to do.

Building a strong culture has to come from the very top. Otherwise it won’t stick. Your employees need to clearly understand what your vision, mission, values and goals are and see, as well as be part of, how that gets “lived” through the organization everyday.

Companies with winning cultures are better able to execute on strategy; their employees maintain a healthy external focus on customers and competitors rather than on internal politics or turf. Employees think and act like owners—they take personal responsibility for overall business performance, not just their slice of it. They also exhibit a clear bias for action, with little patience for bureaucratic debate.

I believe Merck CEO Richard Clark statement sums it up nicely, “The fact is, culture eats strategy for lunch,” he stated. “You can have a good strategy in place, but if you don’t have the culture and the enabling systems that allow you to successfully implement that strategy, the culture of the organization will defeat the strategy.”